Cursed Girls and Sin Eaters
by a half-measure
Summary: After it's all over, the king visits his son in the dungeons. What else is there to say? There is still enough time to tell the story - the story of the last Selection, the Selection that ended in blood and poison. (I would really appreciate constructive criticism, no matter how harsh!)
1. I

_This story's old but it goes on and on until we disappear._

 _Calm me and let me taste the salt you breathed while you were underneath._

 _I am the one who haunts your dreams of mountains sunk below the sea._

 _I spoke the words but never gave a thought to what they all coul_ d _mean_.

* * *

I trust that your bonds are not too tight, my dear son, my Artem. Please don't struggle. You shouldn't bother. You're soft. That isn't your fault. All princes are soft, and these cells are built for hardened men, men with ribs like steel and bones like brick.

You are soft. That is my fault. My mistake.

It is a shame that you never met your mother, you know. You are very like with your tempers and your rages. I imagine she would have doted on you. Yes. She would have adored her son, I know. How ironic that that she was tried for being a poisoner. Right now, especially, Artem, I imagine irony is much on your mind. Please - don't speak. Not just yet. Let us enjoy one another's company a little longer.

It has been years since I thought of your mother. I didn't choose her, you see, although I thought I had. I should have seen it coming, but love makes you so very, very blind.

She was beautiful when she died.

The morning of her execution she had her attendants dress her all in red and braid her hair with fresh roses. Wine-colored stones cluttered her fingers. There are several paintings of it; she died opulently. It was drizzling - I remember that. I was to walk her to her tomb. It was something like a wedding processional as she took my arm and we went together, down the steep steps. The place was dark and it smelled of incense. My wife leaned close to me and whispered that I looked splendid in black. I remember not being able to say anything, only taking her hand and pressing it.

I wished, more than I ever had wished, and I was not answered.

Outside, the rain began to fall hard. We heard the shrieks of the assemblage; aristocrats don't like to be wet.

My wife smiled and said, "I bet they wish they were down here where it's dry."

I forced a smile and made myself kiss her cheek and bid her farewell. Her scent was as sweet as rot, but her skin was as waxy as the petal of a lily, as though she were dead already and merely playing at breathing and bleeding, for our amusement, for our amusement. And her eyes were as black as ink. The palace guards were waiting at the top of the stairs. They did not look at me.

Even then, she was still my wife. I was a dutiful husband. I loved her. I had commanded the cooks to put the very sharpest of my hunting knives beneath the food they had prepared for her. I wonder if you would do that for me, Artem. Perhaps you would. After all, it cost me nothing to be kind.

No. It cost me nothing.

Do you see this cup? A beautiful thing, solid gold, one of the few treasures of our family that remains. It was my father's. He had a cupbearer bring him his wine in it, even as his other guests drank from silver. He believed that the gold would neutralise any attempts at poisoning - would chase out the venom as mercury through the blood. Can you believe that? If only he had thought to treat his wife with the same suspicion, the same reverence, as he treated the golden cup.

I have it here beside me, just as you filled it—half with poison and half with cider. It will go down easy.

No, sit, sit. Calm your blood. We have a little time yet.

I have a story to tell you. You've always been restless, too busy to hear stories of people long dead and secrets that no longer matter. But now, Artem, bound and silenced as you are, you can hardly object to my telling you a tale:

What good is a fairytale without a princess? All the good fairytales have princesses, and all the best princesses have curses. That's the nature of it, isn't it? We cannot bear to be happy; we devour conflict - our hearts long for war.

There's all sort of curses, you know. The kind you wear like a shawl and discard when you outgrow them, the kind that holds you back like chains around your ankles lest you sprint head first into the world. And the kind that's stitched into your skin, intrinsically, inextricably yours, a part of the fabric of your being, woven into your sinews.

Lots of girls have curses, you know. Some of them can't speak a word lest they kill everyone in earshot, and some of them fade into thin, wispy things after midnight, as ephemeral as smoke. Some of them can't tell the truth, and some of them can't lie, not to save a life or take it. Some of them have blue mouths and pale skin, the walking dead, and some of them dig graves with their bare hands, every single night.

Your mother wasn't cursed. She poisoned with her wit and her words. But the one before her, the last Selected? She devoured poison and when she kissed, she killed.

That's why the Selection ended. Because she finished it with blood on her teeth and skin under her nails. Because my father died for it.

But you started it again, didn't you, Artem?

I wonder, sometimes. If you knew what you were doing, when you reopened the Selection.

How could you have known this would happen? I cannot blame you, any more than I could blame you for bleeding.

Let me tell you the story of your grandmother, who won the last Selection and killed the king.


	2. II

_My first love was a murderer b_ _efore I ever got to her,_

 _Tongue so sharp and serpentine, and I w_ _altz to remember her._

 _And I heard a curse being born, f_ _orming each finger_ _and forming each thorn._

 _Things never got better -_

 _Practicing lies to drip like red wine off her lips_.

* * *

This is a story about your grandmother, Artem, but before that I have to tell you about your mother.

Otherwise, you won't understand, and what a sin that would be.

Your mother was beautiful, and I have no doubt that if she drew breath today she would still be so. The day I learned of the verdict, the day I led her to her death beneath the ground, I looked at her one last time, and I tried to remember what she looked like, although I knew all that she had thought and planned and did.

Last. Such an awful word. It hangs in the air, does it not? Listen to it, the crisp finality of it. There is no going back from last, Artem, but even then I didn't realise this simple fact. I looked at your mother, and found I could not contemplate the idea of never doing so again.

I had not expected her to be both the poison and the poisoner, and I found myself studying her pale skin and black eyes for some sign that it was true. You have her eyes, you know. Black as sin. Perhaps I should have known. I should have seen it coming.

That day before the murder, I leaned toward her unconsciously and something about her scent, sweet as rot, made me dizzy. I stepped back abruptly, lest I fall. I had no choice. I looked her in those black eyes for the last time, Artem, and I...

Well.

That was my mistake, you see, because I chose her. Your grandfather never had that opportunity. Oh, he had the illusion of choice, like a wavering mirage, a mistruth dressed in appearances and unreality. He had thirty five girls in front of him and he was told he was free, free to pick any of them as his wife. But what kind of a freedom was that? It was the same kind of freedom as giving a caged bird a view of the sky. So long as he doesn't move too precariously on the perch, will he ever notice? Or will he spend all the while longing, aimlessly?

Those girls had their own curses, of course. My mother, with her poison kiss. But there were others. They wore their demons on them, clinging to them like shadows, like fog that refuses to be burned away by the rising sun at dawn. I think you would have liked some of them, Artem. The way my father described them to me, they were stars. Each of them, a burning light.

But my mother burned brightest. That was why he chose her.

I wonder if you will guess which one she is? You aren't like her at all, you know. She was calm. She had ice in her veins, where you have molten lead. It isn't a fair comparison at all.

She was strong. She had ribs of steel and a heart encased in iron. She could have walked through the seven circles and emerged unscathed. At least, afterwards that was the case.

But at the beginning, when she entered the palace, she was a scared, cursed girl like the rest.

Of course, you wouldn't know what it was like for them to be summoned to the palace, would you? It was not an aberration, Artem, like your Selection was. This was an honour. The highest honour. A sign you were destined for great things. A sign you were destined for the throne.

There were thirty five of them. By the end, there was one. And, Artem, not all of those girls left that high-walled cold-floored palace alive.

But you were expecting that, weren't you? I remember. That was always your favourite part. When I told you this story as a boy - that was the only time you listened. Strange, isn't it? Strange as silver sparrows. That's what my mother would have said. She liked to toy with words, try them and test them, almost as much as she liked to toy with people. She liked sibillance. The hush of it, like acid rain.

I should have seen the signs. That was my fault, Artem, not yours. I should have seen the signs.

When you said you wanted to restart the Selection... How could I tell you? How could I tell you? How could I tell you?

The last Selection had been fifty years ago, and it had brought blood.

You know, the elders of the provinces remember it still - in nightmares and half-waking dreams, as though it remained painted on the canvas of their eyelids - but they do not speak of it; the youth speak of it - in whispers and in mutters, with eyes cast furtively this way and that - but they do not remember it.

They are fortunate not to.

Our hearts crave war, after all.

Shh. This will be a long night after all, Artem, if you keep trying to interrupt me like this. Allow an old man his memories. Let me speak. Ease yourself. Would you like a drink?

Haha. No. I suppose you wouldn't, would you. Forgive me. My mind is idle, and drifting.

You know I am above that, don't you? I have no need of venom. I have other things to take its place, you know, the fever-pulse of vain honour and the ignominious nobility of a futile chivalry, like a wooden breastplate, weighing me down without protection. I never wen into a battle with poison on my breath or lies on my tongue, boy, and you'd do well to remember that the next time you find yourself in the dark whispering that old mantra to yourself - what if, what if, what if.

Where was I? The girls. Of course. Thirty five in all, and although they all matter, not all of them are inportant. Certainly not to the telling of this story, my son, and your eyes look so heavy, threaded with lead, that I fear you won't stand to listen to any unnecessary details. So with the girls we shall begin, and you shall listen well.

Well, where to begin? I'll begin with the curses.

Listen closely, my son.


	3. III

_We dance with the devils,_

 _And make your halos the color of sinner's portraits,_

 _And smothering it means everything's lovely again._

 _Nothing's quite as it seems; s_ _ociety's altered you see,_

 _Kill all your fear in your sleep -_

 _Because everything's formed in a dream._

* * *

There were a lot of curses, but I'll start with Chernila's:

The day that Chernila's name was drawn to the Selection, she was ill in bed, as sick as a dog, with a fever that left blood stained on the edge of her teacup whenever she raised it shakily to red, red lips for a cold sip. She was alone in her room, which was not truly a room but a corner of one, cut off from the rest of Hael's study by a thin dark curtain. And behind this curtain she had her futon, thus, and she had a single shelf upon which she put the little pieces of watches and the needles and ink-pots crusted with unwritten words. She told me once that -

Yes, Artem. Chernila survived to see me. She was not so beautiful then, when I knew her, but you could see it in the corner of her eyes and the edge of her jaw that she had once been and may be so again. Her hair was as black as black could be, and her eyes were like charcoal. She had rich brown skin and a way of looking at you that made you feel as though there were hooks running through each strand of your hair, and they were being pulled, very lightly, one by one, gently enough that after a while you would begin to wonder you were just imagining it, dreaming it with your eyes open and trapped, inextricably, by hers.

She was not your grandmother.

It was an expression she shared with Hael, who was the man that raised her. He was not her father, her uncle, her grandfather, her brother or her godfather - he simply was. And it was Hael who taught her to arrange her expression thus, and it was Hael who carried the news to her that she was no longer Chernila, but now a lady, and a champion in the bout for the well-guarded heart of a soon-to-be king.

Her headache fluttered at the back of her eyes, a butterfly, a thousand butterflies, trapped in her skull, but she smiled anyway, and the blood that stained her teeth could not make her any less beautiful.

Smiles do not change, my son. It was the same smile I saw when I met Chernila first, the day that she came to the palace to pay her respects to my uncle and to condemn my mother, who had committed such a venomous crime. She came through the door like an old woman, and she moved slowly like a crone, though the other Selected woman with her, Kesali, wore her contempt like it was a living thing borne on her back with its arms around her neck. They seemed an unlikely pair - Chernila's skin dripped dark with stitches and ink, and Kesali's hands were rough-worn, as though they had been shod by iron.

Chernila smiled when she saw me, but that day Kesali did not. Smiles may not change, Artem, but people do, and all of Kesali's blithe contentment had been eroded by the blunt world around her.

They knelt before me, first on one knee, then on two, and then they prostrated on the cold white floor, touching their forehead to the ground and speaking to the marble, their eyes still, their gaze steady. Of course, they were no strangers to the palace then; they had been in the Elite. They knew what to do, and what would get them killed.

My uncle had waited for them to chant their greetings, Kesali spitting it like an oath, Chernila crafting the words with an uncertain tongue. He still sat, uncertain and uncomfortable, on my father's throne - it is not an easy thing, Artem, though I see by your expression you believe it so. To take the place of another and know that they will never be again, that you will never again rise for them or fall for them, that is powerful and that is humbling.

Shh. Your words, like daggers in my ears, mean nothing. You promised me. You said you would allow me a story.

My uncle wished to give no one, peasant or noble or foreigner, the opportunity to say he was too comfortable in his brother's throne and crown. Such uncrafted aspersions, such shapeless impressions, may have been given meaning out in the rumour mill of the country - and there were plenty of people, Artem, who wanted to believe he had killed my father.

My mother was beloved, you see, beloved and believed, so easily.

So my uncle sat uncertain at the edge of the throne and bid me stand closer also, so that it was clear that he was merely regent, still loyal to his prescient lord and his future king, though only one was present. He smiled at me as well, a sad smile; that did not change either, not for as long as I knew him or as long as he advised me.

"Come here, boy," he said to me. "You must hear this."

Kesali rose quickly, and the movement of her long limbs were like a fan flicking into shape in a lady's hand - she was sure, if she was not elegant. Chernila moved more slowly, as though she were afraid of shattering, glass bones and brittle limbs on marble floors. She clasped her hands in front of her stomach, the bronze rings that cluttered her fingers stark and gleaming. Kesali put her hands behind her back, as though to hide the ragged edge of her fingernails.

They did not smile.

"We had nothing to do with this," Kesali said. Her curse hung on her heavy, Artem, it dragged her low and held her down. "You must believe us."

"We condemn her," Chernila said. Her curse was lighter in those years - it clung gently to her edges, as though it might dissipate in the rain. "We disavow her and all knowledge of her misdeed."

I believed them, Artem. I don't know why I did, but I believed them.

Perhaps I thought of her, of the girl Chernila must have been when she first learned of the Selection and that she would join it as a lady, of the smile she would have worn when Hael told her and the way her eyes would have darken as he began to stitch the next curse into her skin, for her own protection at the palace.

Was that why? I think it must have been, Artem. Some strange spectrum of pity and sympathy that made me look at her and at Kesali and believe them when they said that they had not killed my father.

That day she was Selected, her bones were light, her eyes were warm, and not even the silver flash of Hael's needle could deter the sweetness of her smile. She couldn't have known, that day of the drawing on the Report she had never seen that three months later the king would be married and dead.


	4. IV

_I met up with the king - he confessed his body was burning._

 _I met up with the king - his body had begun to rot._

 _And he said_ , don't think less of me. I'm still the man I used to be.

 _But no one believed him. No one believed him._

* * *

Hma had only seven fingers and she blamed the wolf for that.

She had hunted it down, of course. As though she could let it go free, having down what it had done, seen what it had seen. It had made her bleed, Artem. It had made her bleed, so she took her machete which had belonged to her mother and to her mother's mother, whose edge was keen as midwinter frost. She sharpened it on ceramic before she left, and tested its blade against her skin, pressing lightly until she drew blood with the slightest touch of iron.

So armed, she put her machete on her back and she went out until she was so far from home she could no longer see the smoke in the sky or the glow of fire behind her. She went and she found the wolf, curled in its den with a maw stained with gore and coagulate and flesh under its talons. But, my son, Hma did not find her fingers. Those were gone by then, swallowed whole and gone, and she had nowhere to wear her rings.

She took its teeth instead, and wore them in the hollow of her throat. Doesn't that seem fair? That's the girl that you see in all of the photos - the girl with seven fingers and wolf teeth, the girl with jackal eyes and spidery limbs, as though she were caught in transfiguration between this human form and another more feral.

That was not her curse. I see the question in your eyes, the incline to your brow, but it was not. It was merely who Hma was.

Was it the slaughter of the wolf that sealed her fate? She would have been a fool if she never asked herself that question, I think. She took that blade in her hand knowing what would happen, and I don't think she would have done differently if she had known what was to come.

My father told me, as I am telling you, that the first time he spoke to Hma was the first night of the Selection, with the sounds of sweet bells still ringing in his ears like the ghost of a half-remembered memory. You can sympathise, I'm sure, for I have never known the pressure of thirty-five destinies in my hands, to wreak havoc upon at my very own discretion and pleasure. I have ruled a nation, Artem, a nation split at times by disaster and bloodshed, but there is something intimate about the Selection I do not believe I will or can ever understand. It was this intimate fear that chased your grandfather out to the garden where he would find Hma.

The night was glossy with gloom; the moon was a slender crescent hung aloft tenuously in an iron-studded sky, and the air was still and soft. In the moonlight, all the plants were the same, their shining leaves merely silvery and their flowers shut tight as gates.

The rich soil of the palace was soft, and it had parted easily beneath Hma's seven fingers. That was how my father found her, that very first Selection night; still dressed in the sleek red dress that has been chosen for her, her silken hair falling in tangled threads about a heart-shaped face with eyes like carbuncles, she was clawing at the ground and the dirt and rocks within like it had stolen something from her, and her eyes were very far away.

She saw him standing there and her eyes did not change. Her fingers were black with earth and she looked almost feral in the dim light of the palace windows. He didn't think she knew it, but he was afraid. He didn't think she knew it, but she did.

"Your highness," she said hoarsely, and with clay blackening her hands and blood dripping from a freshly-opened wound on her head, she bent herself into a bow in front of your grandfather, her hair falling across the ground like she had spilled it, carelessly. "Your highness," she said again, and there was no smile in her voice.

She had tried her best, Artem, not to go out that night, but it was as inevitable as the tides or the seasons that she would. The night before, the last night she had spent at home in the small house she shared with a family that was not hers, she had fought against the curse, and she had won, a short-lived victory that meant nothing because it had only delayed the inevitable.

They had eaten fox that evening, in a celebration of her Selection, and afterwards Hma walked into her friend's bedroom and asked him to stay with her.

"Vran," she said. "Stay with me."

What was she asking for, Artem? Stay and make her forget her nightmares. Stay and sleep next to her. Stay and chase the bad dreams away, the memories of blood, of dead parents, of dead girls with eyes like black coals. Stay with her and keep her from doing what she must.

It was a selfish request from a selfish girl.

Hma was not your grandmother.

"Where else am I going to go?" Vran replied. Unlike Chernila or Kesali, I never met him; he was dead in my time, dead and buried and wept for. But my father used his name as a shorthand for loyalty, my son; to be referred to as a crow in my father's court was a commendation of the highest sort, and I think that says all I could say, in the most beautiful kind of way.

And Vran was loyal, for as long as anyone knew him. He loved Hma, and she loved him, in that manner that was more than love; not in the way you believe. I see the tilt of your head; I know how you think. You are wrong, Artem, and I must say it is rare that I utter those words. No - the tempestuous element of romance would have borne the same enmity with their relationship as mercury to the blood of man. In what manner do you love your shadow, your reflection, the movement of your limbs and extremities?

But Hma slept soundly that night, as soundly as the dead, and the next morning when she awoke she could hear the air escaping his lungs, the pulse of blood through his veins, the creak of his ribs with every breath, and that reassured her, wholly, utterly, that she was alive.

Here is the photo I mentioned. Do you see her? Here, between Chernila and Tsiuri - she is a little taller than the others, and shaped rather like a dagger, all sharp straight lines. She was not a friend of the girl with the harp, Fermata, not truly, but one of the two did not like to talk and the other of the two could not talk, and so their silences suited one another, and it was often they were seen together. Fermata was soft. She reminded people of a caged songbird, with her tongue split into a fork to coax from her a song. She was delicate, Artem.

That's why, at first, they accused Hma of killing her.

Can you see her eyes? The colour is faded, but they are gold. They do not belong to her. I do not think it is possible at all that they belonged to her.

No. Hma must have stolen those eyes from the wolf.


	5. V

_One soft infested summer, you and I became friends -_

 _Trying in vain to breathe the fire we were born in,_

 _Catching rides to the outskirts , tying faith between our teeth,_

 _Sleeping in that old_ _abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat,_

 _And hiding on the backstreets - hiding on the backstreets._

* * *

Hma may have had the eyes of a wolf, but she had the lightest touch of any of the girls, and when she was in the mood she would braid their hair if they asked her. She would sit cross-legged in the grass outside the balance with their hair in her hands and feathers and beads and bits of lace lying in her lap and she would weave them together until their hair came alive with colour and light. She braided my mother's hair the day that your grandfather fell in love with her, and she put ribbons and cardinal feathers and tiny fragments of almandine and raw umber.

You know, when my uncle told me this story I always wondered why my father didn't choose Hma in the end. Wasn't she the obvious choice? Wasn't she an excellent choice? She was brave and she was sure and she had a gentle touch and the eyes of a wolf. She was loyal, even when it didn't matter a whit. She fought her curse off, night after night, even when it left her bloody and bruised and exhausted.

I asked my uncle that, but I don't believe he understood what I was trying to say, Artem, because of all the girls he had met in his life I think that he had only ever had eyes for Tsiuri. He met her during the Selection, when she competed for his brother's heart. Tsiuri was small and slender and she had mismatched eyes, shaded in increments blue and green like beads of sea glass. Have you ever looked towards the sun in high midsummer and found its colour, at the edges of its zone, to be more white than gold? That was the colour of her hair, almost silver with light, although at night, when midnight drew near, my uncle saw that it was closer to gray than to silver as she began to fade.

In the old stories, midnight draws monsters from within men like they are reeling them out on hooks, pulling them from the deepest darkest recesses of who and what they are to put them on display in the world. Think of the cinder girl, who reverted to her true self after the twelve chimes; think of the haphazard soldier who lost his form and became a wolf in the earliest hours of the morning. In that moment between one day and the next, that impossible, intangible moment, it is so easy to become undone, for your stitches to unravel and the threads of your being to unspool. So easy, Artem, that it almost seems like the kinder option.

That was what happened to Tsiuri, and that was why she always left the dances before midnight. My father would see her watching the clock like she was expecting it to bite, waiting for the hands to tick tick tick closer to the top. At half past eleven, she would waltz her last waltz, take a last spin on her heels, kiss the other Selected girls and bow to the king. At quarter to twelve, she would excuse herself from the room, and her heels would click click click from the great hall as the laughter continued, unabated without her. At five minutes to midnight, Tsiuri would flip shut the lock of her bedroom door and sit against it while she waited to unbecome.

It is hard, Artem, once you have allowed yourself to be undone to become once again. To take form after you have lost shape, to will yourself into existence and craft yourself a new existence, moment by moment - that is truly difficult, and Tsiuri began to lose the habit. She entered the Selection with full lips and a soft body, with glossy hair and bright eyes, and by the end of the process she was a wretched thing, like she was a faded photograph of the girl she had been, with greyer hair, with duller eyes, with cheekbones and hip bones and collarbones that pressed against her skin like they were trapped within and eager to escape. She had difficulty keeping her skeleton where it was supposed to be, and it took her longer to become real again each morning; the sunlight would scorch through her, as sudden as a heart attack, and she would be lost again.

Maybe that is what happened to her, after the Selection. Perhaps she just lost herself, lost her shape and could not recover it again. Perhaps she is a hanging spectre still, insubstantial as smoke, visible like a dust mote in an indirect beam of sunshine. It is strange that I have not thought of her; my uncle did not like me to speak of her, you see, and my father was dead and my mother a murderer so I knew very few who knew her. Unlike the other Selected girls who survived the chaos of those three months, she never came to the palace to beg for life and for clemency on bended knee.

Perhaps she is dead.

Dead, as Uzundu and Fermata and the others are dead. What a death toll there was after that Selection; how many graves were dug, and needlessly, needlessly. Coffins are heavier than what they hold, my son.

We did not give your mother a coffin, you know. I regretted that, afterwards, though at the time I was afraid of how heavy it would be. We did not allow her a funeral either:we buried her hastily, as the dark drew close like a curtain silencing a play. You know where to find her grave, don't you? At the very edge of the family's mausoleum. I had to insist, though my uncle argued. She was my wife, no matter how much wrong she had committed. No matter how numerous her sins.

Kesali devoured sins. Did I tell you that before? They called her a sin eater, but there was no absolution in her curse. She consumed, but she offered no forgiveness or ease of conscience - she was selfish too, in a different manner from Hma. Most people are, you know. Selfish.

My father held her hand once, while they stood at the edge of a river and looked out at the light dancing on the water, and he saw that the veins at the thinnest part of her skin had become as black as basalt like her blood had turned to ink and venom in her heart. They crept up towards her face, those black, black veins, crawling further ever time she fed, and by the time I met her for the first time with Chernila by her side, her face was entangled in threads of black thorns beneath the skin, encircling her eyes and stretching from her lips.

No wonder she didn't smile.

She didn't smile then, but before, in the Selection, she smiled often. Her name suited her then - Kesali, the wandering spirit. Kesali, the benign. Kesali, of the forest, of the woods, of dappled sunlight filtering through the leaves on a quiet spring evening.

Your name suits you as well. I was thinking about it, on my way down here. It was your mother who named you Artem. Do you know the meaning of it? It comes from the word artamos - the butcher.

What a cruel kind of humour.

Kesali's name was kinder to her, and at that time she was kind also. She sang. She had not a strong voice, but it was sweet, and Fermata would play the piano while the tune quavered in the air, uncertain of itself. She had learned a spectrum of folk songs from her grandmother, when they worked together at the bathhouse in her hometown - her grandmother, the oldest woman in the village, the one all others called Lady, the one who had scarred her own face when the carriages had come rattling in the last Selection, so that she would not be taken from the family who needed her to work. The one and only selfless act in her life. Her grandmother sang for herself, habitually - for no one else - but still Kesali heard her voice, carried on the breeze.

"All the dead kings came to me," she would keen, on her knees outside the house, her hands raw and red from scrubbing, her eyes narrowed against the cold light of dawn. "At Rosnaree, where I was dreaming - a few stars glimmered through the morn, and down the thorn the dews were streaming."

"And every dead king had a story," she would croon at the sink of the cupboard they called a kitchen, the water murky beneath the ashen crescent of her nails. "Of ancient glory, sweetly told. It was too early for the lark, but the starry dark had tints of gold."

"And I, too, told the kings a story." This verse came only when she sat by the fire, untangling her salt-and-pepper hair from the tight braid she kept bound at the nape of her neck during the workday. "Of later glory, her fourth sorrow: there was a sound like moving shields." A pause, her voice droppinng low. "In high green fields and... in the lowland furrow."

Kesali would sing these songs as well, and though Fermata knew not the notes, she would play a sweet melody to accompany it. And all the while the veins on Kesali's wrist would inch longer and wider. There were plenty of sins for her to eat in those days. She did not go hungry.

But poor Tsiuri did. She faded quickly, and often; she couldn't eat or sleep. How swiftly beauty fades when you are miserable, as she was. And although they were in competition with one another, those Selected girls, she found that some of them were kind. Otrava, the one they called the dead girl for her pallor and blue lips, would knock on her door in the morning, as Tsiuri lay on the ground and forced herself back together, and call quietly through the wood to see that she was whole once more. Uzundu, who, of all the girls, drove men blind with her beauty, would place a book on the chair next to her at breakfast, so that Tsiuri would have somewhere to sit when she managed to slip downstairs. Hma, with her seven fingers and her scowl, would weave bronze and gold thread into her braids until Tsiuri could feel her hair again.

This is what kindness is, butcher; it is in the littlest things, the smallest gestures. Like stars trapped in a fragment of almandine, they shone all the brighter for their murky surroundings.

Kesali couldn't have devoured these moments if she had tried.


End file.
